by James Zug
Parity is the watchword at the Delaware Investments United States Open. Two years ago, the national championship became the first major in the squash world to have equal prize money for men and women.
Ironically, one of the complaints during the move to parity in 2013, among some...
By James Zug
Amr Shabana was never absurdly dominant. The Maestro wasn’t like Jahangir Khan going five and a half years without a loss, or Heather McKay not losing a game in sixteen years. Shabana won one match in five and another in four en route to his last major, the 2014 Tournament of Champions. Even in his prime,...
By James Zug
Take yourself back to the 1961 National Singles. The men are playing at Penn. In the quarters Charlie Ufford faces his former Harvard classmate
Dave Watts. They are old friends and former teammates. They play together in New York. Ufford has almost always won—he played No. 1 and Watts No. 2 when they were at Harvard—and Watts...
By James Zug
Jesus David Flores is the youngest of four brothers. He is eleven, a fifth grader, a wiry, fresh-eyed, inquisitive kid. His father is a mototaxista—he drives a motorcycle taxi around Cartagena. Jesus joined Squash Urbano Colombia in December 2014, a couple of weeks before the program officially started.
He has...
By James Zug
Earlier this summer, I went to my local club and got on the squash court with Richard Millman. An Englishman who has been coaching in the States for a quarter century, Millman is known for innovative, out-of-the-box thinking (he promotes the iMask, for instance). We played hard...
By James Zug
Forty-one years ago John Beddington wrote a tiny paperback squash manual, Play Better Squash, which was published in London by Queen Anne Press (the publishing house that Ian Fleming ran; perhaps the reason there is no squash in the James Bond books or films is that Fleming...
By James Zug
Squash is one of the cleanest sports in the world. Only twenty professionals have been suspended in the history of testing.
Drilling down into these positive tests, one sees a few facts. Although some players whisper about rumors of failed tests among players of certain developing countries—Egypt, Pakistan...
By James Zug
Photos by Marian Kraus
The MetroSquash Academic & Squash Center, the fourth stand-alone purpose-built urban squash youth enrichment facility in the U.S., opened this spring in Chicago.
The certificate of occupancy was issued on April 1, 2015. It was exactly ten years to the day after MetroSquash had been...
By James Zug
During the gala dinner at the biennial World Doubles tournament in Chicago, US Squash honored Paul M. Cussen with the United States Olympic Committee Volunteer Coach of the Year Award.
Cussen started his involvement with MetroSquash as one of the program’s first volunteers soon after the program launched in 2005....
By James Zug
Brett Meyer and James Meyer, a father and son duo in New Zealand, are the Guinness Book of World Records holders for the longest squash singles match in history. They set the original record in 2008 at twenty-five hours, fifty-five minutes. In April 2015 the Meyers went...